“I hate large beach balls,” Celia Rowlson-Hall said at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week.
A director, choreographer and performer best known for her quirky and surreal work in film, Rowlson-Hall was rehearsing “Sissy,” an idiosyncratic hybrid of dance and theater. It draws on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down. The boulder is represented by a giant beach ball, and in rehearsal the performers were having trouble lofting it into a net suspended above the stage. After failing a few times, they succeeded, only to have the ball bounce back out again.
This Sisyphean moment was not planned, but it might easily have been part of the choreography. “Sissy,” which runs at the Baryshnikov Center Thursday through Saturday, is the kind of production that playfully blurs the line between real life and make believe. It’s about a director-choreographer (Zoë Winters), a new mother who is making a dance piece that uses the metaphor of Sisyphus to symbolize the difficulties of balancing motherhood with her artistic life. Rowlson-Hall came up with the idea while she was pregnant and working on a feature film.
“It was a camera movement in my head,” she said during a rehearsal break. “I saw the camera coming around and revealing this woman who had been hiding behind the rock the whole time. And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s her story?’”
Much of the story that Rowlson-Hall wrote is drawn from her life, but it’s nested in layers of fiction and art making. In “Sissy,” which alternates between scenes of dialogue and dance, Winters’s character presents a work-in-progress set in a rock quarry. (Lucas Hegseth plays a quarry worker.) A dancer (Ida Saki) pushes the beach ball around, dances out childbirth, then pushes a slightly smaller beach ball (representing the moon) while holding her child — a child played by Saki’s own 1-year-old son.
The showing seems to be going fine when it’s interrupted by a paleobotanist, who announces that she has made a “once in a millennium” discovery in the parking lot: the fossilized root system of the world’s oldest forest. It seems the boulder that is the director’s show is rolling down the mountain again, and she will have to adjust to the new circumstances — a process made more farcical because the paleobotanist is played by the gifted physical comedian and actress Marisa Tomei.
“Celia called me and asked if I was interested in the myth of Sisyphus,” Tomei said. The two had known each other socially, and Tomei had been impressed with Rowlson-Hall’s work. After a long conversation about the tarantella and other “mythic dances,” she signed on.
“Marisa had been in my head because I wanted someone who would come in with full ownership of the space and a sense of comedy,” Rowlson-Hall said. “I like the idea that this one interaction blows up the director’s entire show. She can no longer ignore reality coming into the building. But then it actually informs a richer world for her.”
During the rehearsal, Rowlson-Hall was adjusting to the reality of the theater, and the technical difficulties of realizing what she had imagined. “In the studio last week, everything was perfect,” she said. “Coming into the theater is like this explosion happened, and I’m picking up the pieces.”
The pressure of making these adjustments less than a week before opening night was unfamiliar to Rowlson-Hall, who has spent most of her career working in film.
“In film, you can try different takes, and you shape a lot of your story in the editing,” she said. “Right now, I have to make choices and maybe realize they’re not right but not have time to go back and change them.”
Trained as a dancer, Rowlson-Hall started her career performing for eccentric, theatrically minded concert dance choreographers like Faye Driscoll and Monica Bill Barnes. Quickly, though, she moved into choreographing for film, fashion and television, gaining attention for her work on the HBO show “Girls” and in music videos for Alicia Keys, Coldplay and the Bleachers. She also made many movement-based short films — ingenious, imaginatively free and frequently hilarious. In 2017, she released her first feature, “MA,” a dialogue-free, dreamlike vision that might be described as a modern-day Virgin Mary’s pilgrimage to Las Vegas.
It was only after giving birth to her son two years ago, she said, that she had the desire to return to stage work. As she began creating her female Sisyphus show, she worried about her father, who had been wrongfully confined to a psychiatric ward. Then Saki, her lead dancer, revealed that she was pregnant.
“I could no longer compartmentalize,” Rowlson-Hall said, “and the only way I was going to survive the moment is if I packed it all together.” Later in the process, both of her parents died suddenly, of different causes. And so into “Sissy” it all went, along with the play-within-a-play (or dance-within-a-dance) structure and an actual discovery by paleobotanists that Rowlson-Hall read about.
“Whatever is happening in her own life or in that moment, she’s just like ‘This belongs in the show,’” Saki said.
Like most of the cast, Saki has worked with Rowlson-Hall before. “There is no brain like Celia’s brain,” she said. “On every project, when I read what she has in mind, it’s so vivid and otherworldly that I always think ‘How is this even possible?’”
“On this project, there has been obstacle after obstacle,” Saki continued. “But Celia makes it part of the show. That’s what the show is about — pushing that freaking rock.”
The darkness of Rowlson-Hall’s recent struggles has not damaged her sense of humor. “Sissy” finds room for a goofy disco dance and an elaborate ensemble number with light-up aircraft-marshaling wands.
Although Rowlson-Hall often stars in her own films and has acted in projects like the film “Aftersun” (2022), she chose not to cast herself in “Sissy.” But Tomei noted that because Rowlson-Hall is a performer, she can understand an actor’s process and adjust accordingly. “There’s a very open dialogue there,” Tomei said.
“Being with the dancers, I’m in heaven,” she added. Tomei began her career with dreams of dancing in musicals and has relished the opportunity to be physically expressive, she said, “thinking in shapes and body sculpture,” stylizing gestures, getting carried around and dropping into the splits when necessary.
Tomei described the whole creative process as one of “transformative alchemizing.” In “Sissy,” a female artist faces obstacles — “some of them have to do with biology, some with life cycles,” she said. But while women often hide or minimize such challenges, this artist incorporates them into her art.
“This show is such an honoring of where Celia was in her own life at that moment,” Tomei said. “To see her work with it — naming it, showing it — that’s really important.”
